Oh Linux, how shall I count thy installs?

Everybody loves statistics. Statistics can be used to say just about everything when they are boiled down to a nice colourful pie chart. Even with the same set of numerical data people can draw different, sometimes conflicting results. I have heard it said that statistics are simply a means of proving your point. I have also heard it said that 76.3% of people believe that you put a percentage sign behind any random number they will believe it to be true. Research and marketing companies especially love statistics. That is how they make their money by providing the numbers to make their paying customers feel good. Yet there is the old adage GIGO, which means Garbage In, Garbage Out. It seems to me that just about all of the numbers regarding operating system installs fall into that GIGO category. Of course bloggers, journalists and article writers take those numbers and spin them into fanciful stories for their readers to eat up like so many cream puffs. These fevered outpourings of fanatical minds are often used to show how their operating system has the most market share and consequently is the bees knees and of course everyone should be using it. Where do these statistics come from? Most of the time it comes from sales data provided by the companies supplying the operating systems and this is where the problem lies. This is because while companies of proprietary operating systems actually rent their products, open source operating systems are not. So any statistics regarding operating system market share are automatically bogus and can only be used for FUD campaigns. While there are proprietary open source companies they do not sell the operating system. What they do sell is a service for their purposely prepared operating system. This sale of service is counted as a single operating system install while in fact that operating system can be installed several times. Companies that rent proprietary operating systems have a direct one to one relationship between the rental copy and the sale. You may have noticed that I mentioned rent and not own for the proprietary operating systems. This is because the End User License Agreement used by a particular proprietary company that I know of specifically states that the purchaser only has the right to use the operating system and does not own it. In other words they are renting it. So the question here is. If marketing and research companies want accurate statistics (assuming they do) then how can they count the real number of Linux installations? Quite simply they can't. This means that 93.4% of the statistics recorded only show less than 9.8% of the true number of Linux installations (where did those numbers come from I wonder :). I put this matter to you. Is there anything that can be done to work out the real number of Linux installations? Is it even possible given that Linux is installed on more than just computers? What do you think?

I've always been fascinated with graphics and wrote my first drawing program on the venerable apple ][e. After discovering the x86 IBM clones and wrangling my way into the computer industry I'm now immersed in work as a System Administrator, OS builder (linuxfromscratch) and general technohead.